Killing in the name - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

As this debate has raged, mostly to our global south, I have found myself at a crossroads, unsure of which way to turn. People are, increasingly, being seen as numbers as they’re thrown out of the country, thrown off of their healthcare, villainized and stripped of their rights, having their benefits taken away and killed in pointless wars.

 

The Trump administration - along with other like-minded governments and corporations around the world - are killing people. Oh, they may not be sneaking up behind them and stabbing them through the ribs, but, make no mistake, people are dying as a result of the decisions being made by this government. 

 

Months ago, I wrote a column about the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a man with a wife and two kids, by someone who allegedly targeted him over the methods used by UnitedHealthcare to refuse to aid its patrons. (The words “delay”, “deny” and “depose” were alleged to be written on the shells of the rounds that killed Thompson.) I said that, regardless of what was going on in insurance, we cannot condone a world in which people walk up and shoot one another.
Now, at the risk of inciting violence, I’m not so sure. The money-saving methodology of corporations like Thompson’s, whether it’s by destroying water supplies, the environment, mass lay-offs, poverty wages, the list goes on, is killing off a certain class of people. But, the higher class simply does not care. As long as they have what they need, everything is fine. 

 

Just recently, the news broke that ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi, after leaving the post, is now fighting cancer. In days gone by, the world would respond with empathy, saying that no one deserves to go through such a thing and yet, sympathy for Bondi was scant. In one of her exchanges as she turned her back on sexual assault and trafficking victims, denying them justice, she famously misdirected to the high standing of the DOW Jones. Needless to say, when Bondi’s cancer news broke, many found solace in the Dow being over 50,000.

 

Empathy breeds more empathy and regular folks today are finding it hard to muster it up as the rich get richer and the poorer matter not.  

 

In The Big Short, the phenomenal film about the ’08 financial crisis, a disillusioned banker, played by Brad Pitt, says that he hates that the banking system reduces people to numbers. As a pair of investors celebrate making a bet that will pay off in the event of the collapse of the American economy, he tells them that, if they are right, people will lose homes, jobs, savings and pensions. The number he invokes is that, every percentage point unemployment rises in America, 40,000 people die. They didn’t know and, at the time, anyway, they didn’t care.

 

Here, we have two people on the stock market, indulging in a bit of harmless business. The same as Thompson just doing his job or Bondi, Trump, whomever making policy decisions, cutting here, trimming there. Cutting a program may be seen by some as day job stuff - numbers on a page - but behind them are real people suffering real consequences. 

 

So, when someone denies someone else care they rightly deserve, someone knowingly contaminates a community’s water with their data centre, terminates someone to fatten their own pockets, refuses to prosecute a pedophile to get ahead, they may not be walking up to someone on the street and shooting them, but, in a clean, white collar, increasingly legal way, they are doing the exact same thing. 

 

People are waking up to this and standing up for themselves. And hey, if that’s a problem, there’s comfort in the DOW topping 51,300.